Installer
Posted October 1st, 2003 @ 09:48am by Erik J. Barzeski
Y'know, one of the things I miss about the old OS installer is the ability to install the OS from the CD without having to boot from the CD. You could double-click an installer and install the OS onto another disk while continuing to do your work.
Right now I've got a Firewire drive aching for an OS installation, yet I don't want to kill 45 minutes of my time booting to an installer CD and running the installers. I want to get work done during those 45 minutes.
So what gives? It's not piracy protection - a disk image, if burned properly, is just as bootable as an OS install disk. It's not that the install spans multiple CDs - several software packages handle this properly. What are the reasons that prevent me from being able to launch the installer as we did back in the days of yore?
Donate Life
Posted 01 Oct 2003 at 5:24pm #
Disk images are not bootable, so that won't work. You can device-copy the install CD to a hard drive, which makes the process faster (if you don't count the time it'll take you to make the copy.)
Booting from the install CD isn't what makes the process slow. Copying 700MB from a CD is slow, period.
Posted 01 Oct 2003 at 5:32pm #
I think you've missed the point… The point is: I want to be able to install to a disk I'm not booted from, just as I could with Mac OS 9. In other words, I've got two 250 GB drives in my G5. One has an OS on it, the other is blank. I'd like to install from a CD to drive "B" while I'm sitting here using drive "A" as my boot volume.
Posted 01 Oct 2003 at 6:06pm #
There's an "installer" command in Jaguar that looks like it can be used to install Installer packages, possibly pointing them to alternate directories. (Mac OS X Server 1.x used to include a shell script, installer.sh, that could do this because it didn't actually have a working general-purpose Installer.app.)
I'm not sure if it'll do the right thing for a system software install onto another volume, but it might be worth checking out if you have an old machine laying around or something as a testbed.
man installer for details.
Posted 01 Oct 2003 at 9:18pm #
Actually the installer command line app is part of the the installer ui app and hooks right into the framework. You can in fact install packages using this, and can in fact install a system on a separate drive using this method. Keep in mind you can also force other things to be installed so um yeah...more questions? IM me.